In search of a job, my experience passing by Canonical (Ubuntu)

Hi all!

First post here, I thought I'd share that job search experience and would love some feedback, too!

A little background first :

I just moved in the US, got all the work permit and personal admin stuffs sorted and now I'm looking for a new job.

Now of course that feels like prospecting but with very high stakes including properly settling in this new environment. That implies some challenges as my CV doesn't state I've worked in the US before, and I guess according to some questions I've had when I can talk to people some places are a little reluctant to that. Some even told me they'd only recruit US citizen of green card holders (currently in the last stage of this process).

So dozens and dozens of job post reviewed and filled-in, linkedin searches to reach the teams I apply to and get insights or even referrals, and so on.

Now I've been willing to work for Red Hat for a while for different reasons, but they didn't have any Sales post in my region, so I looked at the competition. That's when I came across Canonical.

So I applied, the process was averaging my experience until I got contacted by HR for a written interview, yeah!... wait what?

Yes, a written interview.

Ok, I'll play this game, I have no choice anyway if I want to get in there...

So it's basically question you answer in a written form, at the time I'm like why not...

Why not? Let me tell you why not!

Here are the email including the questions, copied and pasted:

As Ubuntu rises in prominence as the new face of open source in the enterprise, from cloud to private infrastructure and the edge, we are growing our global team of sales leaders and account managers. We seek organised and tech-savvy sales professionals who understand how customers want to transform their operations to be open source first.

The selection process has several stages:

• Resume review (done)
• Written interview and standardised tests (this stage)
• Hiring team and cross team interviews
• Final executive interview

The current stage is your written interview, an opportunity to show us what’s important to you and how you communicate. If you’ve already completed this when applying for another role, feel free to reuse elements of your previous submission.

Please answer these questions in a PDF:

Sales experience

• What are your key strengths as a salesperson?
• Which Canonical products or services do you think are most relevant in your market?
• Describe your experience of global, multi-national account management.
• Do you have a track record of consistent target achievement? How do you plan and organize yourself to achieve this result?
• Describe a situation where you actively had to craft a strategy for your customer, which delivered satisfactory results.
• How do you prefer to develop pipeline?
• Please provide examples of sales training or sales methodologies that you have been trained in during your previous or existing employment 
• Please provide examples of the technologies that you have sold to date
• If possible, please provide examples of Software, SaaS, Infrastructure, Cloud solutions or open-source software solutions you have sold during your career?
• Provide examples of C-suite relationships you have gained and built upon when leading a large, global or strategic customer account?

Education

• How did you fare in high school mathematics, physical sciences and computing? Which were your strengths and which most enjoyable? How did you rank, competitively, in these subjects?
• In languages and the arts at high school, what were your strongest subjects and how did you rank in those among your school peers?
• Which degree and university did you choose, and why?
• Which university courses did you perform best at? How did you rank in your degree?
• Outside of class, what were your interests and where did you spend your time?
• What did you achieve at university that you consider exceptional?

Context

• Outline your thoughts on the mission of Canonical. What is it about the company's purpose and goals which is most appealing to you? What is risky or unappealing?
• Who are competitors to Canonical, and what does Canonical need to change to be a more effective competitor?
• Which current dynamics in the cloud software industry are favourable to Canonical? Which are unfavourable?
• What is important in the internet of things? What sort of software development approaches and capabilities are important for IoT?
• Why do you most want to work for Canonical?

Please make your submission as a PDF at the URL given below. My colleagues and I will review your submission in an anonymized queue to reduce bias, please do not put your name in the document. Give me a week to review and consider your submission.

Thank you! I look forward to reading your work, and meeting later in the process.

Now this is a lot worse than a video call, doesn't take into account the non-verbal aspect of my presentation, and most of all, WHY SO MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT MY TIME IN HIGH SCHOOL? I DIDN'T HAVE ANY "COMPUTING" COURSE BACK THEN (it was middle school!)! AND WHAT IF I DID'T GO TO UNIVERSITY??

I actually did and this is a lot worse than any BA or Master level assignment, and I don't really understand how it's helping much in terms of recruitment? What are they actually looking for?

I still did it, and do regret that decision. I submitted it in less than 24 hours putting aside my job search to do it, I ended up with 8 pages... The next day I got an email from the same HR person asking me if I received the first email even though I had already submitted it... and just a negative answer right after that.

Alright, on to the next one, you know. At this point I did a little googling about the company and, well, it doesn't seem I would fit the culture (there isn't a lot about it on their website, I did read everything there is before applying).

But I thought, they asked me this much, I'll ask for a little feedback... Well I think I'm not gonna get my hopes up on this, still nothing 10 days later!

I really felt the brutality of the unbalanced process that is a job search in a rawer form than usual... I don't think I put too much identifying info in there, hopefully not, but I really wanted to vent about this experience. There you go, sorry for the long post! What do you all think?

Have a great week!